we went to seattle and we went to disney land which was most important, and we traveled to kansas where my grandmother's family was from, and went to chicago and went to yellowstone. we took greyhound buses most of the time and we rented cars and would stay in local motels or howard johnson's and if there was a pool at one of these motels, even if it was just tiny, i would be very excited and the ice machine was exciting and the vending machine, i was really excited about that, but this is at a time when you didn't have 600 stations and 24 hours worth of cartoons and so at night if the tv was on, it was what your parents decided to watch. my mother, that summer, would turn on the tv every night during this vacation and watch the watergate hearings. i can't say that i understood everything that was being discussed, but i knew the issues were important. i knew they spoke to some basic way about who we were and who we might be as americans. so slowly during the course of this trip which lasted about a month, some of this seeped into my head and the person who fascinated me most was this ma